Soap Box

A loud voice is perched above a black frock and below a black book held high above black hair.

“You sinners will be sleeping with regret tonight!”

His words are brief clouds of white that quickly disappear. Their meaning rolls listlessly along the bed of snow made black from workers working their way home. A shuttle bus drives by, kicking up slush.

I look up and to the right at the clock tower. Six after five. “Time will soon replace regret with another trick,” I say, turning towards him. He brushes away a few lonely snowflakes from his shoulders and continues. “Without forgiveness, your past sins will drown your future in eternal darkness!”

A woman to my left raises her gloved hand and bellows out the word taxi. A homeless man stumbles toward her, whispering the word please as his empty hands shake at his side. She gets in the taxi and is driven away. I tell him I have no cash when he asks for help. The preacher tells him he needs Jesus.

Little warmth is found behind a heavy wooden door that slams hard. I face other faces in a mirror that runs along the back of the bar. Their heads are bowed, drowning above half-empty glasses. Shirley and Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll” plays from the jukebox.

The chair groans as my lungs sigh and soon my belly feels the warmth of barley.

Behind a window framed in frost my eyes track pale profiles gliding by in a background of white. The word another? taps me on the ear and I nod without looking.

Fingers, wrinkled and stained yellow, wipe a mug dry with a blue towel before sticking the glass under the tap. “It’s like the center of Dante’s hell out there tonight.” The barkeep punctuates his sentence by slapping the tap back with the side of his hand.

The glass lands in front of me, and I pull it toward my lips, watching the foam fall over the edge. I set a portrait of Lincoln on the bar. “And the devil’s on the corner selling a haven from regret.”

The barkeep turns his back and lowers his head. The cash drawer kicks open and lands on his stomach. The eyes of dead presidents stare back at him. “At what price?”

I reply, “Cognition,” pulling the glass away from my lips. Foam hangs in the corners of my mouth. “No different from you.”

A chuckle jumps out from behind the bar. “Except I never lie to you about what I’m selling.” The bartender turns and sets two green portraits of George Washington next to a puddle of beer, taking Lincoln away.

I pull a pen from my pocket and flip the two faces over. “And you preach without words.” Twice I bury the word God under a thick coat of ink.

I had to recalibrate my mind after rejecting the very faith (the very meaning of my existence) that exhorted my yearning to love and be loved as an abomination. I had to process the isolation and self-hatred of being a gay man in the military during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

I had to navigate depression, suicidal ideation, and a life void of purpose.

So I cultivated and nurtured my own purpose. I studied fiction and philosophy.

I merged the two into a novel. I lived and breathed and took witness through five characters, woven together into a single narrative.

The five characters are based on the five existential archetypes outlined in Simone du Beauvoir’s, The Ethics of Ambiguity.

The Nihilist
The Sub-human
The Adventurer
The Serious Man
The Passionate Man

I’ll leave you philosopher lovers out there to figure out which character belongs to which existential archetype.

Writing this book saved my life. It’s a pretty good read, too!

My First Novel: Remnants of Light

Just a guy trying to be creative before I’m kicked off this spinning spaceship suspended in a vast void.

Why photography?

We’re forever locked within a specific set of limited perceptions and spatial relationships. This vision we enjoy is defined by cells stacked in the eye. These cells only absorb and process a small portion of the entire spectrum of light.

We see so little of what is truly out there.

I try to use the camera to deviate from those familiar perceptions, to reframe those spatial spaces, to expose thin slices of time that change our relation to experiences teaming with unknowns, flashes of awe, and beauties unseen.